There is a widespread interest in listening to music for pleasure. Listening to music is usually a passive activity, with a user listening to music in the background as a source of relaxation, often while seated, or as a source of motivation while performing some other task, such as working out.
There have been several proposals to adapt seats to make use of a musical input. Massage chairs, which stimulate a user's body whilst in a seated or lying position, are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,027,463 (Moriyasu), U.S. Pat. No. 4,779,615 (Frazier) and DE 20 2005 001862U. All of these are intended to provide relaxation to a passive user. Cinemas and home cinemas have also made use of seats for audience members with dedicated audio speakers to deliver sound from a prerecorded soundtrack of a media item, such as a film or a game. Again, the user passively experiences the prerecorded soundtrack.
The Penn & Teller Sensor Chair (J. Paradiso, MIT Media Lab, 1994, http://web.media.mit.edu/˜joep/TTT.BO/chair.html) is a chair which was developed for use in a magic act simulating a séance. A plate on the seat of the chair causes the occupant of the chair to act as a transmitter and a sensor array is mounted in front of the chair. Movement of a user's hands and feet is detected by the array and used to trigger sounds or adjust volume or timbral characteristics of sounds. This chair requires a cumbersome array which was disguised, in the magic act, by a booth but which makes the chair unsuitable for many other applications.
The present invention seeks to provide an interactive experience to a seated user.